Shuriken with joy

Slicing fruit. It doesn’t sound like much of a game – more a monotonous task for a bar worker before the Tequila Sunrise orders start flowing in.

Having played Fruit Ninja for Android on and off for the past few hours, it’s still tough to say why it’s so much fun.

Twisting my melons, man

There’s no great depth to Fruit Ninja. Fruit gets lobbed up from the bottom of the screen, calling for you to 'slice' each piece in two with a swipe of your finger. Occasionally, a bomb will be thrown into the mix, which should be avoided.

Aside from two subtle variations on play – Classic mode, which keeps going until you make three mistakes or hit a bombs, and Zen mode, which requires you to chop as much fruit as possible in one and a half minutes – that’s your lot.

There are plenty of achievements to unlock and online high-scores to beat, thanks to decent OpenFeint integration. There are also loads of new blades and backgrounds to unlock, although they’re largely cosmetic.

But none of that explains why you’ll keep popping back to Fruit Ninja during ad breaks.

Lord of satsuma

Fruit Ninja gets you in its mysterious vice-grip through sheer tactile joy. It just feels so good slicing through all that finely modelled fruit, all of which splurts its acidic contents satisfyingly over the background.

Slicing through multiple pieces of fruit with a single swipe somehow makes you feel like a martial arts god – far more so than most beat-‘em-ups.

Even the entirely random Critical hits you score from time to time are engineered in a way that releases an unusual level of endorphins. Perhaps it’s the meaty (or should that be fruity?) swoosh that accompanies them.

Fruit Ninja’s suitably shadowy method for success may never be fully understood, but it doesn’t need to be. Slicing fruit in its company is a moreishly repetitive joy, and it brings a much needed dose of polished casual gameplay to the Android Market.